Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop?

[Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de>]

I am a great fan of my old EEEPC, beecause it is tiny and running a long time.

But it is 32-bit, not fast, although I spent him 2GB fast RAM and a SSD.

So I tested with several window managers. There was no number 1 winner, but 
IMO the fastest one was LXDE. Almsot the same speed gave me XFCE (which has a 
little advantage, that it can look like Windows_10).

As LXDE is no more developed, I tries its sucessor, LXQT (a conglomerat of 
RazorQT ans LXDE), which was amazingly just as fast as XFCE (but slower than 
it), but is looking more comfortable than LXDE or XFCE.

Gnome I never tested, because I do not like it personally, but I tested 
Plasma5 (former KDE), and it was still ruunning smooth on my slow netbook. 

However, in Plasma5 I noticed, that the bottom bar is flickering, when I hover 
the mouse over it. This appeared after an update about 2 years ago (guess, 
they changed some code, so it got slower). As this is not a bug at all, I did 
never file it.

So, that is the tests I did. 

How in practice? Well, when I am on the road, I am using often a livefile 
system (here: kali-linux) or the native installed system (here: debian/
bullseye 32-bit), and when I need speed, LXDE ist my first choice, especially 
when running kali. 

For my normal work, when speed does not matter, I am using either LXQT or , 
for comfort and a I am a dinosaur, Plasma5 (you can well work with it, it is 
just 10 percent slower than XFCE).

Conclusion:

If speed is most important: LXDE (maybe sometimes no more available)

If speed is most important and you need Windows_10 look: XFCE

If a good relation between speed and comfort: LXQT

If comfort and some flickering does not matter: Plasma5

There are also other WM available, which may be faster, like fvwm95, openbox, 
twm.

And last but not least, there is TRINITY, which is a modern build of KDE3 (or 
4???), which is running fast and has great comfort.

However, it is not in the debian repo, and it does interfere with Plasma5, but 
it is worth a look. I ran it a while on my EEEPC, but it got interfered with 
Plasma5 (especially kmail), so I deinstalled it. But if you do not want 
install Plasma5, try TRINITY.

Hope this helps!

Best regards

Hans